- Sold their IPO very very heavily, as a reason for joining, not their culture or anything they were doing. Just their IPO. You know how that panned out.
- Very culty town halls, with absolutely no numbers of any sort. I've worked at a lot of startups, and I've never seen anything like that before or since. Hopefully things have changed with the new CEO
- On my first day, I saw the performance improvement plan in my desk drawer of the engineer they had fired previously. They hadn't even bothered to clean out his desk properly. Ominous.
- Tight knit team but in a way that was almost oppressive, team had their own private lunch together away from everyone else (even other engineers), 3-4 times a week, they would take a break and play foosball together everyday at 3pm. I quickly tired of both of these, had no interest in foosball, and would go to lunch with the team once or twice a week, but that seemed to make the manager unhappy. Team only really hung out with each other, no one else ... was just a bit weird and unnecessary cliquey
- long rambling standups with 10 people, then sometimes we'd have these 'standups' with the SF office as well. Complete waste of time.
- From an engineering perspective, no insights or interactions with production environments (PII concerns). We couldn't get on a rails console/command line *even on staging*, so we'd literally have to email back and forth with devops to figure out bugs, absolutely bonkers. We had Sentry as an exception handler, but that was it.
- No support in a new and unfamiliar role, I'd never done the job before (was hired into a role one level higher than I interviewed for), but I was expected to be performing at a very high level without anybody telling me what on earth I was supposed to be doing. Things went downhill from there, rapidly.
- Was setup to fail. Immediately thrown into a complex project in a system that I knew very little about. Constantly told that coworkers and team mates were "resources" but they had just as much knowledge of the parts of the code I was supposed to work on as I did, or sometimes less ... it was just that complex a system. When I brought this up, was told to stop complaining and pointing the blame at others. Unwinnable situation
- Constantly belittled, and mentally abused during my time there, to force me to quit, doubly egregious when you realize that as an H1b visa holder invested in a green card process, it was not so easy for me to quit and start that process over. Was told in no uncertain terms, multiple times that I was not "lead engineer level", and even probably not even good enough to be a "senior" engineer. Was written up for coming into work 5 minutes late at one point, the same day someone showed up 30 minutes "late", was written up for leaving work early because I was feeling unwell one day. Absolute comedy, after a while, was like being in high school.
- Was adjudged on "lines of code" (no joke), still have the paperwork where that line item was indicated as an output metric for me, to show I wasn't hitting the "BigCommerce Standards"
- At one point, got re-assigned a new manager to oversee my progress ... from San Francisco. All he did was rely on feedback from people who had already indicated that they had no faith in my abilities, did not give me a fair shake. Did not provide me any help until I indicated I'd had enough and wanted to leave the company to avoid the weekly (sometimes daily) verbal and mental whippings, and severe stress of working there.
- Managed to complete the project, mostly on time, despite all this with little help, only to find the requirements they had provided me had actually made a major miscalculation, rendering the project only 90-95% complete. The project that was sold as some massive emergency where the world would stop rotating on its axis if I didn't hit my deadline, was suddenly not so important any more. predictable really.
- Had an agreement in place to let me leave the company a few weeks before my official end date, to allow me look for work. Found out after landing a job, in just 3 weeks, that they had revoked my H1B visa, so not only could I not take the new job, but I would have to leave the country. Talk about vindictive! As you can imagine this completely upended my life, sent me into a tailspin and a major depressive episode, if not for an amazing lawyer who was able to rescue my situation, I would have been deported and lost everything I had worked so hard for in the USA for 15 years. As is, I lost almost 6 months of savings, and was in severe crisis mode for a long time after that.
- Easily one of the worst places I've worked in my life. Severe Anxiety. Depression. Damaged self confidence. Took some of the bad mojo from this job to the next one, sadly (felt like I had something to prove. Had major trust issues). Even still have some PTSD from my short time there till today. It was that bad.
-Only decided to write this review after realizing that an engineer at Uber wound up killing himself after going through something pretty similar (google it). If something like this happens to you. PLEASE Get help. See someone. Bigcommerce is not right to devalue your self worth based on bs internal metrics. If they were, they'd be the pre-eminent ecommerce platform in the world, not Shopify.
